June 29, 2014

The perception of emptiness was first declared by the Buddha, and then it was followed up by a monk called Tsongkhapa in Tibet. They had both gone into samadai (a meditation that can last for many days and nights,–the samadai of Bodhdiharma, for example, was said to have gone on for 9 years,… .) and all of those guys had emerged with enlightenment,–a kind of otherworldly wisdom called Prajna ( google Heart Sutra for the meaning of Prajna), and out of their newly found clarity, they had perceived this world of phenomenon as basically empty by nature.

However, the use of the word ’empty’, or its noun ’emptiness’ is problematic. It is no more than a false name, a counterfeit, an ill-used representation, or a term that has missed the mark in conveying proper connotations for which it is assigned. When viewed with Prajna, this existence of ours is anything but empty. There is in truth no such thing as emptiness anywhere. Had emptiness been in force, there wouldn’t even be a being called Bill! But ’emptiness’ is used nevertheless, in order to aid understanding in folks who are used to their worldly intelligence, such as cognition, reasoning, the use of logic and calculations. Then the next step is to ask the question: where is that baby Bill today,– and in a 100 years, where will that person possibly be? –will he still be around,– only assuming another form, maybe?– or will he exist in another world altogether? And who on earth is Bill anyway? –is he in fact non-existent, or a formless being of no death,– other than the perceived births and deaths of his many forms undergoing these perpetual changes? ( can we now say then, that the baby called Bill is no more,– the teen called Bill is no more, neither is the youth once called by the same namesake…) And what about the name Bill itself, or that nationality by which it is used to identify ‘Bill’ with?– now baby Bill might have been baptized as Bill, and on his birth certificate he was registered as an American national,– but as soon as the baby had left that church with his parents, he was never the same again. All of these observations are actually based on the fact that if one uses a type of exposure video camera to capture the ultra- slow movements of growth, one should be able to discern the baby body’s rapid transformations, not unlike that of the unfolding of a blossoming flower captured on video! Life is such a flux,–and existence itself, still an unresolved mystery through science.However, growth, by definition is in itself consisting a series of births and deaths, called metabolism in biology, or when being shown on the aforesaid video, some kind of metamorphosis on a cellular scale.) Another point: the geography of baby Bill’s birth was no more than a borrowing, out of convenience, of a certain national identity, isn’t it? Baby Bill might have been born in Japan by a different karma (i.e., the chanced union of actions and circumstances, according to Buddhism,) and would probably have been called Hitachi instead, and if that had been the case, people would have identified him as a Japanese, not an American? So given such circumstances, how much of our Bill is a reality, and how much fiction?

If Bill hasn’t really existed, then y-e-s, you’ve got it!– we are really looking into emptiness, and alas, we have been trying to locate Bill in vain, because there is not a single person who can be called Bill. We cannot define or point to Bill at all, since by definition, Bill must be a singular, unique individual with a concrete identity, he would have to go through a specific set of circumstances of existence, such as receiving the genetic codes from a specific couple of man and woman that he, by happenstance, called mom and dad, and so forth. Now we are encountering a difficulty, as multiple people with the same namesake confront us. And there are more than one persons who is called Bill here. How mistaken can we possibly be?

But of course the cause for existence, molded by karmic forces, or the convergence of circumstances and actions behind Bill does exist, otherwise there would not be that person under that namesake at all. For that reason, emptiness can also be called the master of Bill’s existence. In Buddha’s view, it is the Buddha nature of Bill.

Don’t dispute anything at this point, because life itself is such a miracle,– so anything is possible! Where are we from? Why have we assumed this existence? Who am I?

Oh, life is such a flux, and existence itself is mysterious enough! But that would come under a discussion for another day!

Now as one conducts a somewhat similar query on Knox, or my friend San, or Ben, or an African elephant, a lion, a chipmunk, a fish, a housefly,– and what have you,… then according to both the Buddha and the monk Tsongkhapa, we have all made wrong assumptions to begin with, and we have all been grasping emptiness as real from the very first moment of life, i.e. we have regarded the world through a mistaken viewpoint, and everything else in the world as real and have their own nature. And as a result of this error, or our attempts at solving the mysteries in respect to the universal phenomena have come out all wrong, Even the atom is now found to be empty, so they say, and some are insisting that they have discovered other components as well within an atom,–which means that an atom is no longer an indivisible entity. From that primordial error, we have perceived phenomena through the wrong lenses,–and that is why all our quests for truth (scientific, philosophical, artistic, religious, etc. etc.) would end up in a quarry of conundrums. By the same impulse our reactions or interactions with the world, and with each other, bear so much on our behaviors, customs, beliefs, perceptions, points of view, in molding our judgments on things like morality, life and death, the notion of heaven, the First Cause, Christ, Santa Claus, Marxism, Capitalism, the killing of innocents, exploitation of the powerful, holy wars, religions, ethics, psychology, philosophy, art, science, etc.,etc. And because our perceptions have been thoroughly misguided we are like blindfolded people living in confusion.

Buddhism is really not a religion. It may surprise many people who have believed otherwise. It actually began as a holistic quest for truth by Gautama some 2500 years ago.Then people through the Ages kept misrepresenting and misinterpreting it, until it has become what it is today,–a shabby, completely useless piece of philosophy!